How Do Short-Term Spending Bills Affect Medical Research?

The past few months we've seen several short-term budgets for the federal government.

That's affecting funding for construction projects, the military and even the National Institutes of Health, which awards grants to biomedical research programs.

Short-term funding bills have caused concern for some researchers in the U.S.

"It makes researchers nervous because the National Institute of Health is the funding arm of biomedical research," Dr. David Pearce said.

But right now, Dr. David Pearce with Sanford Research isn't one of them.

He says the NIH hands out grants at different times throughout year. His program isn't in line to receive one at this time.

"As luck will have it right now, Sanford doesn't have any grants that will fall into that period where they are discussing, 'Do we maybe hold back the award? Or do we decrease the award because we're not sure what our budget is going to be next year,'"Pearce said.

While his research team won't be affected this time around, he's still paying attention to what the future could hold.

"We're skilled at this. This is our business. We've been through this before because we have a large number of grants so we anticipate and just keep an eye on the situation," Pierce said.

We also reached out to Avera. We're told their research is not being impacted by the short-term spending bills in congress.